Melancholy Quotes - Page 5

• Here rests his head upon the lap of earth, A youth to fortune and to fame unknown: Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth, And Melancholy mark'd him for her own.

  Thomas Gray

  Humble, Earth, Lap

  "ElegyWritten in a Country Churchyard" l. 117 (1751)

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• As a human being Plato mingles regal, exclusive, and self-contained features with melancholy compassion.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Plato, Compassion, Self

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• What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two: melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land.

  Che Guevara

  Two, Land, Entering

  "The Motorcycle Diaries", 2004.

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• Abraham Lincoln was not all brooding and melancholy and patient understanding. There was a hard core in him, and plenty of toughness. He could recognize a revolutionary situation when he saw one, and he could act fast and ruthlessly to meet it.

  Bruce Catton

  Understanding, Saws, Patient

  Bruce Catton (2011). “This Hallowed Ground: A History of the Civil War”, p.27, Vintage

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• Youth, however, can afford to enjoy even its melancholy; for the ultimate fact of which that melancholy is a prophecy is a long way off.

  Richard Le Gallienne

  Long, Way, Facts

  Richard Le Gallienne (1915). “Vanishing Roads, and Other Essays”

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• The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

  Oscar Wilde

  Believe, People, Rose

  Oscar Wilde (1999). “De Profundis: The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Writings”, p.159, Wordsworth Editions

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• Sorrow was made for man, not for beasts; yet if men encourage melancholy too much, they become no better than beasts.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Men, Sorrow, Too Much

  Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1867). “Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote”, p.71

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• It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. Statesmen despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians have usually similar feelings: there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.

  G. H. Hardy

  Appreciation, Art, Writing

  G. H. Hardy (2012). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.61, Cambridge University Press

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• The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, 'Let me in - let me in!' 'Who are you?' I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself. 'Catherine Linton,' it replied, shiveringly (why did I think of LINTON? I had read EARNSHAW twenty times for Linton) - 'I'm come home: I'd lost my way on the moor!' As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window.

  Emily Bronte

  Children, Struggle, Home

  Emily Bronte (2014). “Wuthering Heights”, p.31, Race Point Publishing

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• There was something terrible, but also something sad and melancholy in this long cry uttered by the Russian infantry as they staged an attack. As it crossed the cold water, it lost its fervour. Instead of valour or gallantry, you could hear the sadness of a soul parting with everything that it loved, calling on its nearest and dearest to wake up, to lift their head from their pillows and hear for the last time the voice of a father, a husband, a son or a brother...

  Vasily Grossman

  Brother, Husband, Father

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• Somehow this literary genre, which most people condemned, acted as a sort of counterbalance to Charles's soul; it was the ballast that prevented him from lurching into the serious or melancholy, unlike Andrew, who had been unable to adopt his cousin's casual attitude to life, and to whom everything seemed so achingly profound, imbed with that absurd solemnity that the transience of of existence conferred upon even the smallest act.

  Félix J. Palma

  Cousin, Attitude, Literary Genre

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• Be cheerful in all that you do. Live joyfully. Live happily. Live enthusiastically, knowing that God does not dwell in gloom and melancholy, but in light and love.

  Ezra Taft Benson

  Love, Happiness, Light

  Ezra Taft Benson (1988). “The Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson”, Bookcraft Pubs

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• If work and leisure are soon to be subordinated to this one utopian principle - absolute busyness - then utopia and melancholy will come to coincide: an age without conflict will dawn, perpetually busy - and without consciousness.

  Gunter Grass

  Age, Dawn, Principles

  "From the Diary of a Snail". Book by Gunter Grass, www.theguardian.com. 1972.

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• A pretext-not a cause-is sufficient for us to enter the "solitary situation", the situation of the dreaming solitude. In this solitude, memories arrange themselves in tableaux. Decor takes precedence over drama. Sad memories take on at least the peace of melancholy.

  Gaston Bachelard

  Dream, Memories, Drama

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• Diabetes is caused by melancholy.

  Thomas Willis

  Diabetes

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• Go! you may call it madness, folly; You shall not chase my gloom away! There 's such a charm in melancholy I would not if I could be gay.

  Samuel Rogers

  Gay, May, Madness

  'To - , 1814'

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• ...too much sadness hath congealed your blood,And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.

  William Shakespeare

  Sadness, Blood, Nurse

  William Shakespeare (2009). “Four Comedies: The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Twel fth Night”, p.69, Bantam Classics

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• The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm.

  Walter Bagehot

  Reflection, Doe, Harm

  'Physics and Politics' (1872) 'The Age of Discussion'

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• Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when Joy is the fundamental thing in him, and Grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive state of mind; Praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; Joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live? Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christian, Grief, Holiday

  "Orthodoxy". Book by G. K. Chesterton, Chapter VIII. "The Romances of Orthodoxy", 1908.

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• His pagan barbarity, his explosive and angrily defiant melancholy, his demoniacal instinct . . . these are all echoes . . . of the thousand-year-old Hungarian psyche.

  Bela Bartok

  Music, Echoes, Years

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• I love the autumn for its sense of melancholy seems to strike my need for sadness. There is poetry in the dying of the year and mystery as well.

  Kyffin Williams

  Sadness, Autumn, Years

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• Books are never out of humour; never envious or jealous, they answer all questions with readiness; ... they teach us how to live and how to die; they dispel melancholy by their mirth, and amuse by their wit; they prepare the soul to suffer everything and desire nothing; they introduce us to ourselves.

  Holbrook Jackson

  Book, Jealous, Soul

  Holbrook Jackson (1950). “The Anatomy of Bibliomania”, p.85, University of Illinois Press

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• Dance with all the might of your body, and all the fire of your soul, in order that you may shake all melancholy out of your liver; and you need not restrain yourself with the apprehension that any lady will have the least fear that the violence of your movements will ever shake anything out of your brains.

  Lola Montez

  Fire, Order, Dancing

  Lola Montez (1858). “The Arts of Beauty: Or, Secrets of a Lady's Toilet”, p.114

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• Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought, And with a green and yellow melancholy She sat like patience on a monument, Smiling at grief

  William Shakespeare

  Grief, Yellow, Green

  'Twelfth Night' (1601) act 2, sc. 4, l. [108]

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• Let me be boiled to death with melancholy.

  William Shakespeare

  Death, Let Me

  William Shakespeare, Thomas BOWDLER (F.R.S.) (1831). “The Family Shakspeare ... By T. Bowdler ... Sixth Edition”, p.72

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